A review by sergek94
The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

5.0

ACTUAL RATING: 4.5/5

“I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy.”

This is one of those stories that take you back to those years where you used to see life in that whimsical, childlike perspective, despite tackling serious themes...

Thanks Nicole for letting me read your copy of this book and getting myself into this great story!

After a middle-aged man escapes the social obligations of a funeral he was attending in his hometown, he goes back to a farmhouse he used to visit during his childhood, since his actual home was demolished years ago. When there, he reunites with a lady who's called Mrs. Hempstock, who lets him sit by the little pond in their yard, where he remembers his childhood memories in that area and his close friend Lettie Hempstock.



“I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible.”

So begins our dive into this man's past, where we see the world through the eyes of his 7 year old self, a personality that so beautifully describes that introverted and sensitive child who finds no true joy in the mundane reality of day to day life, and prefers to drown inside his books, taking in all the colour and vivaciousness of existence he cannot truly enjoy in the real world, through the world he creates through this books in his mind. This child's life, sheltered and serene in his room under the blanket his books, his gateways of escape from this harsh and boring life, suddenly takes a turn to the worse when a man's suicide in the area triggers a chain of events that messes with the order of the natural world, letting certain things in that should have stayed out. Luckily, Lettie Hempstock enters this boy's life and acts as an anchor preventing him from drowning in all of the chaos that ensues, even though she herself played an unwitting role in making this chaos latch its way onto the boy as well.



“Nobody looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t. I don’t. People are much more complicated than that. It’s true of everybody.”

Who, or what is Letty Hempstock however? Is she your average 11 year old girl living in the farmhouse nearby? Certainly not. She is much more than that. Could she really just be 11 years old, or was she 11 years old for a long time? Is she human, is she a deity, or is she just a fragment of the all knowing consciousness that holds this world together? Her grandmother, old Mrs. Hempstock, for example, is in reality much older than the oldest woman alive, and she was most probably right there when the moon was first created.

The boundaries of what is clear and what is shrouded in mystery are very thin in this book, and nothing is as simple as it seems.




“Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive.”

If you're a visual reader, this book will give you even more of a trip, because the atmosphere, which is a perfect blend of rich, dark yet pleasantly whimsical, would easily dip the reader into this world, pretty much in the same way one would dip into the "ocean" pond on the grounds of the Hempstock residence and allow that cool water to fill them with a sense of serenity and omniscience. The serious themes such as child abuse, marriage infidelity and suicide covered in this novel are seen from the lens of a child, which add an extra layer of darkness, where we as adult readers know very well the full emotional implication of these damaging events, even while reading them from a childlike two-dimensional point of view.

“Does it make you feel big to make a little boy cry?”




“Monsters come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are things people are scared of. Some of them are things that look like things people used to be scared of a long time ago. Sometimes monsters are things people should be scared of, but they aren't.”

If you aren't a fan of whimsical tales that blur the lines of what is clear and what isn't, you might not appreciate this novel too much, but if you're one of those people who love those brilliant strokes of limitless imagination, then you're in for a ride. I personally loved this book, and I will be rereading it one day. Although I would have liked certain characters to have more of a focus, such as the child's mother and her dynamic with her husband, the work as a whole is lovely. Neil Gaiman is brilliant, and since this is the first work I read by him, I'm looking forward to reading the others. Every second I spent reading about being inside the Hempstock farmhouse, with their cat purring on one side of the room while our main character enjoyed a delicious meal while the moon shone in its fullness from the window upstairs, while not being full downstairs, was one of the best immersive experiences I've been through.

This will be added to the list of books I would want to gift my future child, and it definitely won its place in my heart. Definitely recommend!

“Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. Truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.”